Category Archives: Movies + TV

by | July 27, 2015 · 1:16 pm

Shocking News from The Bachelorette: One Solitary Woman Was Harassed on the Internet!!!

Image via Caroline Gormley

Image via Caroline Gormley

OMG you guys—so, I’m getting caught up on The Bachelorette for tonight’s FINALE!!! and just needed to report back on some important findings from the “Men Tell All” episode that aired last Monday! So like, color me shocked-as-fuck—my jaw is literally hanging open; YOU ARE NOT GOING TO BELIEVE THIS: I learned on “The Men Tell All” that Kaitlyn had the extremely rare and shocking experience of being a female public figure who was slut-shamed and harassed on the internet! She even received death threats! Continue reading →

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by | July 13, 2015 · 9:00 am

The Emotional Stages of Realizing The Phantom of the Opera Actually Sucks

Are you trying to control me with your sexy hand?

I used to be one of those ideological pseudo-purists that only engaged with media that jived with my politics—a totally sustainable way of life if you want to think about !!Important Issues!! 24/7. Don’t get me wrong: I’m still all about Racebending and #WeNeedDiverseBooks, but American popular culture sure doesn’t make the struggle easy. Before I started working full-time, I had the mental fortitude to read plot summaries and cast lists to seek out media that passed the Bechdel Test at the very least, but the pacifying ease of shitty media slowly brought me over to the Dark Bland Side. I had so few fucks to spare after standing in a 120˚F kitchen for 10 hours, and that’s how I ended up watching The Phantom of the Opera productions every night for three months.

Of course I rationalized it, passionately defended it to friends, and parroted a line found in every think piece: “But it’s actually really smart!” I’m standing in the cold, unfeeling light of Acceptance now, but it’s been a struggle. Here’s how it went down: Continue reading →

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by | July 6, 2015 · 12:25 pm

The Bachelorette Is Changing the Rules to Accommodate Kaitlyn’s Sluttiness and I Love It

I realized something this past week: The Bachelorette is my favorite show. I can’t say why, and I don’t know that I’ll always feel this way, but like drunkenly pulling smarmy, ugly leather jacket-clad Nick into your Ireland hotel room in a feverish passion, the heart wants what the heart wants. And this week, I’ve just wanted The Bachelorette.

As a show, The Bachelor is a really straightforward narrative of patriarchy: there’s a single boring white dude, and 30 women with blonde highlights and unthreatening careers fighting over him. The Bachelorette, however, is more of a mind-fuck. It more or less always brings us the same tired cliches about hetero romance and gender, the same negative stereotypes and narrow views of womanhood as its brother program, but it’s all wrapped up in a kind of faux female empowerment—a crowd of HOT TOPLESS GUYS with SIX-PACKS, OMG, fawning over one lucky single gal in a glorious triumph for feminism and equal opportunity. This is our turn, ladiesssss!

Sluttiness montage via Inquisitr.com

For a brief moment on this past week’s episode though, it felt like it kind of was. There was indeed a tiny glimmer of feminism, in which the show decided to cater to Kaitlyn’s sluttiness. To be perfectly clear, by saying sluttiness I of course am joking about the double standards that the show and our horrid patriarchal culture perpetuate around female sexuality; by Kaitlyn’s sluttiness I do of course mean her Totally Healthy Female Sexuality. The show saw that Kaitlyn was being unapologetically sexual, and they did some helpful rearranging to cater to it. Continue reading →

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by | June 17, 2015 · 9:00 am

Translating Djuna Barnes to Film: An Interview with Daviel Shy

daviel

My heart gaped when I learned that Chicago-based filmmaker Daviel Shy‘s next project would be a feature-length film based on Djuna Barnes’s novel Ladies Almanack. If you, like me, are enthusiastic about lesbian communities, ex-pat literary culture, fashion, and temporal wormholes, you’ll be as impatient as I am to see it. It won’t be long: the film is currently in production, with an ETA of early next year.

Barnes’s Ladies Almanack, first published in 1928 (full title: Ladies Almanack: showing their Signs and their Tides; their Moons and their Changes; the Seasons as it is with them; their Eclipses and Equinoxes; as well as a full Record of diurnal and nocturnal Distempers, written & illustrated by a lady of fashion), is a sly roman à clef chronicling Barnes’s (mostly lesbian) circle of friends and lovers, and their HQ in Natalie Clifford Barney’s long-running Parisian salon. In reinventing it as a film, Shy is creating a hybrid Chicago-Paris setting and what she calls a “triple time” zone where three distinct periods collide. The film follows characters based not only on Barney (played by Brie Roland) and other thinly veiled figures in the book, including Mina Loy (Brenna Kail) and Radclyffe Hall (Deborah Bright), anchored by narration from French feminists of a later time: Luce Irigaray (Elesa Rosasco), Monique Wittig (Eileen Myles), and Hélène Cixous (as herself). All of these characters blur into the present as they find form in the bodies of contemporary artists and writers. I spoke with Shy about the genesis of the project, her relationship to the book and the community to which it pays homage, and what it was like to work with the great Cixous. Continue reading →

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by | May 29, 2015 · 12:49 pm

“I’m Not Part of This Thing”: On Kupah’s Exit & Racism on This Week’s Bachelorette

#WifeMaterial

I had a lot of feelings about this season of The Bachelorette before it even started, and I considered not watching it in protest of the franchise’s BS decision to have TWO BACHELORETTES—but ultimately I decided that if I was boycotting TV shows because of my politics, I would have stopped watching this horrid show a long time ago. It’s not news that the Bachelor franchise as a whole plays on deeply problematic ideas about gender—the fact that this season the men got to choose which woman they thought made better “wife material” (Kaitlyn, obviously—I’ll put a ring on her finger right now.) is not a line in the sand; it is in fact neither here nor there in relation to the show’s decidedly sexist foundation. Yes I have watched this show for the past thirteen (oh my god how can that number be real) miserable seasons. I have wasted so many hours of my life. And yes I shall continue to waste my life this season. If I believed that being a “bad feminist” was a thing, I might feel like this makes me a bad feminist, but I don’t. I think I’m a decent feminist and also a necessarily flawed human that is vast and containing of multitudes. I sometimes make decisions that don’t always exemplify my political beliefs—I shop at chain stores that no doubt use unethical labor practices, I slather my face with night creams in hope of stopping my inevitable female aging, and I watch The Bachelor. And The Bachelorette.

This past week’s episode was really on point in terms of the show’s heinous politics. The Bachelor franchise has a terrible track record in terms of racial diversity (see host Chris Harrison’s gross comments dismissing allegations that the show is racist here). The past few seasons we’ve seen the show make a minimal, face-value effort to address critiques around this by inviting a handful of people of color into the dating pool. Whether these guys and gals get any substantial air time, or make it past the first several episodes, is another story. But we’ve been seeing some more contestants of color on the show, and with this comes more overt, and not so overt, racism. The all-white or mainly white contestant pools of the past allowed for total erasure of race politics as an issue within the whitewashed alternate reality of the show. With more people of color being cast, white contestants’ privilege to never have to think about race is sometimes challenged, and we get to see how the show frames/addresses race (hint—it is not good).
Continue reading →

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by | March 31, 2015 · 9:00 am

We’re Obsessed With: Lizzie and Ali

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When I was in college, I was friends with this group of girls who had the driest, most deadpan sense of humor imaginable. (Just to be clear, since I have a moist sense of humor at best: I wasn’t in this particular group, I was just friends with them.) They were the kind of girls who would just flat-out lie to you about something, anything, for like fifteen minutes, or however long it took you to figure out that they were lying, but I’m pretty sure they assumed you were in on it and knew they were lying, because they were nice and generous enough to maybe think you were as smart as they were, or almost as smart. Also they had a wonderful, violent kitten named Cupcake.

They all grew up to be dry and deadpan and smart and generous in various careers, and one of them, Lizzie Prestel, grew up to make this webseries, Lizzie and Ali: A Mostly True Story, in which she plays a mostly-true version of Lizzie: one who is just as dry and deadpan as Real Lizzie, but a lot less smart and way less generous.That’s especially true in Lizzie and Ali‘s latest episode, which just went live on Funny or Die. Continue reading →

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by | March 11, 2015 · 1:21 pm

The Feminist Bachelor Recap: Season Finale + After the Final Rose

This fuckin’ guy.

Oh Bachelor Nation, I do not even know what to say to you. For this week, we may have witnessed the biggest blow to feminism In. Bachelor. History. Like you, I am speechless. I don’t know where to begin, so let’s start at the beginning. We’re back in Arlington, Iowa, with Farmer Chris and his Final Two, Fertility Nurse Whitney (whose name henceforth is synonymous with Patriarchy), and Virgin Who Can’t Drive Becca (who will heretofore represent Feminism). Farmer Chris brings both stellar babes to meet his family this week, and then he must make the Most Difficult Decision of His Life. Continue reading →

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by | March 5, 2015 · 9:00 am

Fifty Shades of Grey & Why I Keep Defending Women’s Trash

Fifty-Shades-DIY-640x480In this fantasy he shows up at my boring job and we have an awkward but meaningful conversation. In this fantasy he just happens to walk by my house when I’m outside reading a Victorian novel and wearing a really flattering top. In this fantasy he shows up at the bar and I don’t accidentally have my first kiss ever with the wrong guy. In this fantasy he wants me so much that it drives him insane. In this fantasy he can barely control himself.

I went to see Fifty Shades of Grey in NYC’s Union Square at noon on a Tuesday. It had been out for ten days. The Internet had said the stars had no chemistry and obviously hated sex. A lot of my Facebook friends had said I should boycott it because it romanticized an abusive relationship. Rory and Alison had told me the sex scenes were incredibly boring, but the paperwork scenes were delightful. Marisa had posted a photo on Instagram of her and Matt looking sad after they watched it. So I basically knew what to expect. Continue reading →

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by | March 4, 2015 · 3:11 pm

The Feminist Bachelor Recap, Episode 11: The Womyn Tell All

These womyn are about to tell us so much.

Oh man, oh WOMAN, the women certainly told all this week, and oh how amazing their stories were. The Women Tell All episode started with Chris Harrison babbling about how every Bachelor season they have the Women Tell All Episode, and sometimes, ya know, there’s just not that much to talk about, but this season is SO special and dramatic. Oh please Chris Harrison, we’re not idiots. The Women Tell All consists necessarily each season of a stage full of women, and we all know that The Bachelor‘s very most favorite thing to do is pitting women against each other.

It’s kind of darkly funny—jealousy between women is a thing that we learn from a sexist culture that tells us women have to fight each other for a man or a job or a book deal; it’s a biproduct of a culture that makes us feel invisible and starved for attention through making it harder for women to get the material stuff that many men get easily. As feminists we have to work to unlearn that internalized misogyny. But the thing is: The Bachelor takes that social message and makes it real in order to further perpetuate it. There is actually one boring dude that these lovely womyn have to fight over. They’re perpetuating competition amongst women because they are literally competing. And so the social norm of female jealousy and competition is so, and so on forever. And we get to watch it in its fullest force on The Women Tell All. Continue reading →

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by | February 25, 2015 · 1:15 pm

The Feminist Bachelor Recap, Episode 10: Sex & the Single Girl

Just wearin’ some clothes that we totally understand the cultural significance of!

Ugh Bachelor Nation, we are getting to that point in the show where we should all be glued to our TVs, but instead I am bored. Jade is gone, and I am sad. Britt is gone, and I miss her inspiring makeup and red Chucks. Farmer Chris is boring, and Whitney is boring, and Becca is boring, and Kaitlyn is refreshingly not that boring which makes it all the more depressing that she’s vying for a chance to live with a boring guy in a desolate town in Iowa. I don’t even know who to root for anymore—the one I like best? That she be banished to Arlington, Iowa?!

We’re in Bali, and it’s rully pretty. The first date is with Kaitlyn, at a local temple where they basically go because they’re not allowed to kiss and I guess The Bachelor thought that sacred aspect of this place would be a fun kitchy restraint. Chris has maje pit stains and a monkey jumps on his head and Kaitlyn makes a weird metaphor about going after what you want and wishing she was a monkey. Kaitlyn tells Chris she’s falling in love, and I thought Farmer Chris was only allowed to say things like “thank you” and “it means so much to hear you say that” and *silent tongue kiss* in response, but in an unprecedented Bach move, he says “I’m falling in love with you as well.” Wow, Farmer Chris, “as well,” aren’t you a fancy genius. They go to the fantasy suite together. I am so bored you guys, someone please give me a lobotomy. Continue reading →

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